Gay rights and politica

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On Wednesday 10 May, your newspaper had an article 'Our policies for gay rights' , which detailed the oppressive backlash towards gay rights in capitalist countries.

However, it forgot to mention that in the USA, we are allowed to fight back against the oppressive attitudes of Anita Bryant. In this country, despite attacks and restrictions, we can still fight Mary Whitehouse and the national press. The same for Canada.

But in so-called Marxist/ Socialist Societies we are not even allowed to exist.

In Russia, anybody advocating gay rights would be put in a mental ward. In Cuba, Castro is actually enforcing the measures Anita Bryant would like taken against gays. China still uses the old left-wing bullshit of being a perfect Marxist state in which it has rid itself of the decadent capitalist disease known as homosexuality.

So just come off it! Your article is just a devious means of using gay rights to attack-quite rightly -political fascism in capitalist countries. But what about the sexual fascism practised in the 'socialist' countries I have named?

When are you going to write an article on the totally non-existent gay rights in Cuba, Russia and As a member of the gay community I would like the whole truth about gay oppression, not convenient selections to hide the backhanded game Socialist countries have also played.

Yours sincerely Norton Evans (We appologise • for any errors in transcription, but the handwriting of this letter proved difficult to decipher.)

Lette

and reply Socialist Press replies;

Before taking up the main point of this letter, we have to clear up the areas of confușion which its writer has created.

Our article was not in any sense a 'devious means' of attacking 'political fascism' . In a 'straightforward' way, the article set out our policy on how to fight for gay rights.

More importantly, far from placing this fight solely in the context of fascism, we concentrated on the struggle for gay rights within bourgeois democracies.

Fascist regimes have undertaken what has probably been the most vicious repression and the most ruthless persecution of homosexuality in recent centuries.

Not fascist But as the article showed, these tendencies have been strongly present in even the most 'democratic' of bourgeois states, and are undoubtedly on the increase at present.

For all their violently reactionary positions, neither Mary Whitehouse nor Anita Bryant is a fascist. This is not just a verbal quibble-if we do not correctly analyse the forces we are fighting, then our own strength is weakened.

In the same way, we preceded it, cannot in isolation.

They formed a part of Stalin's moves to restore the family, and this, as Trotsky analysed in The Revolution Betrayed was an essential area of the bureaucracy's strategy.

The family not only acted as the major agent in the oppression of women. It also served to provide the subjection of youth, and faithfully preserved the image of a hierarchical society.

In these, and many other ways, the family could assist Stalin to destroy workers' democracy in the Soviet Union.

The progressive legislation of the October Revolution was either revised' in a reactionary direction, or negated altogether. Since that period, the oppression of women and gay men has been continued with varying intensity in the Soviet Union and the other deformed workers states which were to develop.

Especially in Cuba, attacks on gays have certainly rivalled the atrocities committed by the fascist dictatorships.

It is clearly possible that the fight for gay rights could become a significant part of the struggle against the bureaucratic betrayals of socialist revolution.

But the specific form of this fight will be conditioned by the major direction of political struggle in these countries.

The task of revolutionaries in the deformed workers' states is the fight to develop a political revolution to overthrow the parasitic bureaucracy.

This task is very different in content from the struggle for social revolution in the capitalist states, which means that the fight for gay rights will not follow an identical pattern in Britain and China.

But gays are not faced with the option of either democratic rights in bourgeois society, or repression in the deformed workers' states.

Although concessions can be wrung from the bourgeoisie, and need to be fought for, capitalism is congenitally incapable of ending sexual oppression.

The family can be abolished and replaced only in the course of the development towards socialism, and the material basis for that historic advance can be achieved only by the revolutionary overturning of capitalist property relations.

The Workers Socialist League gives its full support to the fight for gay rights as an integral component of the proletariat's struggle for socialist revolution, both against imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracies.

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ND SHAL